So I’ve started a new project – a collection of short memoir pieces that recount some of the many jobs I’ve had, accompanied by fictional stories inspired by each of them.

From realtor to chicken rancher, from chambermaid to cook to box maker to landscaper to restaurant owner to painter to therapist to teacher – all the way from poop scooper to mentor – my jobs have spanned the continuum of unskilled to skilled to professional.  Individually, though to be honest there are exceptions, they have grown out of some characteristic in me and occupied a corner of my life in an important way.  Collectively, they both speak to who I am and have made me who I am.

And now, in another perfect twist of fate, I get to write about them because I’m a writer…

Work, and the money that went with it, had always been a driving force in my life.  Temperamentally, I was not well suited to work for other people and I had not found a way to make enough money working for myself.  Our lives, my daughter and mine, had traveled a rough road.

Eventually, I was able to finish college and become licensed as a substance abuse counselor.  I worked at a hospital treatment center for 5 years and then started a private practice. I began with 4 clients and rented office space, one day a week, from The Zen Meditation Center. The other four or five days I worked for a friend in her painting company.  I liked the two different energies  – therapy is so complex and painting is so simple – and I needed the money until my practice filled in.  While I painted, I thought about what it would be like when I had a full time practice, of how different I would be when I had a job that was respectable.

One night I was painting in an office – ceilings as I recall – an architectural firm on the waterfront in Portland.  I stood on a desk rather than move it while I rolled out the ceiling and looked out the window at the view these kind of people got to have. As I imagined having such an office with the city lights and their view of Casco Bay, I was envious at their privilege and I resolved to work even harder to grow my own practice.

As I removed the drop cloth from the desk, a framed photo tipped over frontwards and I grabbed for it hoping to catch it before it broke.  The photo was of my client from the day before – yesterday I was her therapist and today I was painting her office.  I thought, “I wonder what she’d think if she knew that?’

And then I realized that what she thought wasn’t the problem.

I realized that I could carry my past in the chip on my shoulder but it was no longer necessary; I was still the chambermaid, painter, chicken rancher, realtor, landscaping box making therapist that I always was.  And that was a good thing.  That whatever job I did changed many things but it did not change who I was.  And that was a good thing too.

And now, as a writer, I get to trot it all out in my stories – Heartbreak at the Redwood Motel, The Turning Point, Who Wants to Buy A Used Trailer – it’s a blast to write them.

In fact, it’s my favorite job yet.